Definition of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing refers to the process of acquiring online traffic and managing the spread of information through social media platforms. Popular social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Google Plus and many more.

Social Media Marketing involves PR & Marketing

According to studies & research, as of 2012, there are 17.5 million active internet users in Malaysia. The most popular social networking sites visited by Malaysians are Facebook, Youtube, Blogspot & Twitter. This represents an enormous opportunity for companies to reach out to an engaged audience who are continuously interacting as a community with shared interests.

Organizations use social media to manage the spread and the flow of information between their brand and members of the public.

Good marketing initiatives for social media typically revolve around creating content that is compelling to encourage the audience to share it with their friends and associates.

Messages and information spreads from user to user and they resonate because it appears to come from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company itself. This form of marketing is also known as word-of-mouth marketing, meaning its results are based on the experience users have had with your brand, or how they feel about you.

This phenomena has lead to a new term called earned media, which attempts to quantify the connection & relationship that consumers have built with a brand.

What is used to measure the success of Social Media Marketing?

If your organization intends to embark on marketing activities through social media, it is important to understand some key metrics that you will encounter throughout your engagement process such as Reach, Engagement and Virality in order to have a better picture of the performance of your Social Media Marketing activities.

Reach

Reach is defined by the number of people who can potentially listen to your messages. In platforms like Facebook, they are termed as fans and are indicated by the number of likes obtained on a fan page.

Engagement

Engagement is a general term used to indicate interactions between the brand and it’s audience. Typically on Facebook, this is measured by action fans take such as when they click like on your content, when they respond by making comments and even making a post on your wall.

Virality

Virality is an interesting term that refers to how often your content is shared with other users. This ultimately boils down to how interesting your content is, how relevant it is to the people that see it and how useful it would be when shared between a fan and their pool of friends.

On Facebook, this is represented by the share function that is used whenever a user feels that their friends would also like to know about it.